Advisors

ADVISORS

The Humanity+ Board of Advisors is a group of between 3 and 15 individuals with significant prominence and prior contributions in areas directly relevant to Humanity+’s mission. The members of the Board of Advisors provide advice to the Board on matters relevant to their expertise, as well as assisting with networking or other Board business as appropriate.

Max More

Max More is CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation. As a strategic philosopher, he authored the seminal transhumanist essay “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy” (1988). He co-founded the original transhumanist magazine, Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought and Extropy Institute in the early 1990s; organized five Extro conferences–the first explicitly transhumanist conferences; founded the English cryonics organization Alcor-UK (originally Mizar); authored “The Principles of Extropy”, “A Letter to Mother Nature: Amendments to the Human Constitution” (1999), “Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy” (1993), “Dynamic Optimism: An Extropian Cognitive-Emotional Virtue” (1992), and more recent papers such as “True Transhumanism” (2009); spoke at dozens of conferences (including several WTA/H+ and Singularity Summit events), and spread transhumanist ideas through numerous newspaper, magazine, and TV interviews.

Sonia Arrison

Sonia Arrison is an author and policy analyst who has studied the impact of new technologies on society for more than a decade. A Senior Fellow at the California-based Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and a columnist for TechNewsWorld, she is author of two previous books as well as numerous PRI studies. A frequent media contributor and guest, Sonia has also given testimony and served as an expert witness for various government committees such as the Congressional Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce and the California Commission on Internet Political Practices. She is an instructor for California’s Command College and serves on the Board of Trustees for Singularity University. Her forthcoming book, 100 Plus, considers the social, economic and cultural impacts of a significant increase in human lifespan and makes the case for strongly supporting the development of longevity science and technology.

Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies “longevity escape velocity”. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

Martine Rothblatt

Martine Rothblatt created Sirius XM Satellite Radio and served as its Chairman & CEO until forming United Therapeutics Corporation, a biotechnology company of which she is currently Chairman & CEO. Prior to Sirius she worked with Gerard K. O’Neill as President & CEO of the Geostar satellite navigation company he founded to help fund space colonization. Dr. Rothblatt has published books on freedom of gender expression (The Apartheid of Sex), freedom of reproduction (Unzipped Genes: Taking Charge of Baby-Making in the 21st Century) and freedom of chimerism (Your Life or Mine: The Conflict Between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation). Her blog Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones is a leading source of information in the fields of mind uploading and cyberconsciousness.

José Cordeiro

José Cordeiro, PhD is Director of the Venezuelan Node of the Millennium Project, Energy Advisor/Faculty at the Singularity University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE — JETRO) in Tokyo, Japan. He is also an independent consultant, writer, researcher, professor and “tireless traveler”. He has lectured as an Invited Professor at several major institutions, from MIT in the USA and Sophia University (上 智 大 学) in Japan to the Institute for Higher Studies in Administration (IESA) and the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), where he created the first formal courses of Futures Studies (“Prospectiva”) and Austrian School of Economics in Venezuela. José has authored and coauthored several books. El Desafío Latinoamericano, his first book, is a continental bestseller originally published by McGraw-Hill and is used in more than 100 universities.

David Orban

David Orban the former Chairman and Director of Humanity+ is a, visionary, and analyst of the global high technology landscape. He is Chief Executive Officer of Dotsub, a US-based technology platform and services company that powers captions and translations as subtitles in any language in online videos to remove barriers to multi-cultural communications. Orban was a founder and previously Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., the OpenSpime technology company, providing the infrastructure for an open Internet of Things. Active in virtual worlds as well, he was the founder of Vulcano, one of the first and most active Italian communities in Second Life. He is also an Advisor and member of the Faculty of the Singularity University, the founder and director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Europe. Together with Tim O’Reilly, Lawrence Lessig, and others, Orban is one of the founders of the Open Government Working Group, which developed a set of principles of open government data in December 2007. Orban is a frequent speaker at conferences such as talks at the Web2.0 Expo in Berlin, the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, PICNIC in Amsterdam, Virtual Worlds Conference (now Engage! Expo) in Los Angeles, SHIFT in Lisbon, Mobile Monday in Amsterdam.

David Pearce

David Pearce is a British philosopher who promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative details how he believes the end of suffering can be accomplished. He co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, and the Abolitionist Society in 2002. Pearce runs a web-hosting company and owns BLTC Research, a series of websites based in Kemptown, Brighton, UK, originally set up by Pearce in 1995 when he published The Hedonistic Imperative. According to the BLTC Research mission statement, the organization publishes online texts that consider benefits of eliminating sentient suffering for future generations.

Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg’s research at the Future of Humanity Institute focuses on management of low-probability high-impact risks, societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, cognitive biases, cognitive enhancement, collective intelligence, neuroethics and public policy. Anders has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modeling of human memory.

James Hughes

James Hughes is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut where he teaches health policy and serves as Director of Institutional Research and Planning. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and is working on a second book tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha. James is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. He serves on the State of Connecticut Regenerative Medicine Research Advisory Committee (formerly known as the Stem Cell Research Advisory Board).

Luke Robert Mason

Luke Robert Mason is a Researcher in Technology and Cyberculture. He is currently Director of Virtual Futures, a series of events that aim to retrospectively critique and challenge notions of the future to understand the evolutionary processes that have given rise to today’s emergent web-culture. Luke’s entrepreneurial work has largely focused on the role media art can play as a tool for understanding one of the most important intellectual and cultural developments of our times – the technological extension of the human condition. In collaboration with a range of theorists and practitioners, Luke provides research and consultancy for companies interested in understanding the wider techno-social impacts of the products and services they provide. For the last 4 years he has been a member of the artist collective the Institute of Unnecessary Research, Luke currently curates an archive of mid-90s cyberculture and is a contributor to the Guardian, UK.

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